


Torn Between

by Meltha



Category: Arthurian Mythology
Genre: F/M, Yuletide 2007
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-07
Updated: 2011-11-07
Packaged: 2017-10-25 19:01:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/273676
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Meltha/pseuds/Meltha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Guinevere speaks with her servant about reality and dreams.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Torn Between

**Author's Note:**

  * For [alexcat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/alexcat/gifts).



> Written as a stocking stuffer for Alexcat for Yuletide 2007.

Lizzie looked up from sewing a tear in her lady’s train to see Queen Guinevere gazing absently out the window and off into the green hills in the distance. The scene was hardly a unique one. Guinevere had grown more melancholy than ever of late.

“Are you sad, my lady?” she asked.

The other woman started as though she had forgotten anyone else was in the room, then tried to muster a smile.

“No moreso than I have any need to be. I was thinking of my husband,” she said.

Lizzie took her at her word, though she knew more than she would ever say about the queen’s heart. It was, of course, not her place to speak her mind freely to one so far above her. A queen was a queen, after all. Still, Lizzie had lived nearly three score years, and she knew what pain looked like and what it was to have a heart torn to bits inside.

“To be sure, my lady, he has been gone for a long time in his inspection of the distant borders,” Lizzie said.

“Twice two months,” the queen agreed. “I had hoped he would return before Christmas, but it does not seem likely.”

“Perhaps best not to raise your hopes,” Lizzie agreed. “The roads are fair drowned from the autumn rains.”

“Indeed,” she said with a heavy sigh, then went back to her own embroidery, her face still sad.

“They say,” Lizzie ventured, “that the entourage of knights who went to pay their respects to the visiting German baron have been sighted not fifteen leagues from here and should be home in a day or so.”

“Aye?” Guinevere said, her tone a bit more curious than she wanted it to be, and Lizzie saw her curse herself for her obvious excitement. “Is’t so?”

Lizzie nodded, wondering whom the queen believed herself to be fooling. Servants always know the lives of the great folk better than they let on. Lizzie had seen how she looked at young Du Lac, and truly, she couldn’t say she blamed her. The man was almost preternaturally handsome, as perfect as an angel in a painting in church. The king, on the other hand, was more human, a bear of a man, earthy and worn from battle.

The queen had not betrayed her husband. Lizzie knew this for a fact because she was never out of sight of at least one of the servants, and Lizzie was quite sure Guinevere did this on purpose to relieve her own temptation. And yet… and yet there was something in the tenderness of the queen’s way of listening to Arthur’s stories of war or judging the latest county fair, the way she smiled and laughed that Lizzie would bet her eye-teeth was not false. She couldn’t understand it.

Guinevere was looking out the window once more, biting her lip absently, her mind far away, but whether it was with Lancelot or Arthur she couldn’t hazard to guess. The embroidery, delicate as a butterfly’s wings, lay forgotten on her lap.

“If my lady will pardon the liberty,” Lizzie said, unable to stop herself, “might an old woman ask what dwells so heavy on a fair queen’s mind?”

It was a terrible risk to take, she knew, and many a noble would have had her whipped for impertinence, but Guinevere only smiled sadly.

“I was thinking of dreams and reality, the distance between them,” she said, her voice as far away as her mind had been just before.

“Tis a heavy thought and more than I can fathom,” Lizzie said.

“A dream can be perfect,” Guinevere said, and her words almost seemed to float, enchanted, in the space between her and the serving woman. “It may be perfectly beautiful or perfectly horrible, but it is rarely anything but perfect.”

“That’s true, my lady,” Lizzie said.

“But reality,” she went on, “that’s what one may touch, and there are flaws in it. What is real is always flawed. Its imperfection is its greatest merit, in its own way.”

“Is it? I should think a flaw would always be a bad thing to have,” Lizzie said,

“Nay,” Guinevere said quickly, and her eyes were suddenly focused on Lizzie with a light that rivaled the hearth’s. “Sometimes what is flawed is more dear for its imperfection because it proves that it is real. For example… a man.”

“I’ve never known one not to be flawed,” Lizzie said, a smile tugging her mouth, but then she added silently that the single exception was the brilliantly perfect, utterly unblemished Du Lac.

“Yes, but perhaps a man may have a hasty temper or a manner that is too crude or a tendency towards secrets,” Guinevere said, and Lizzie noted that Arthur had each of these in spades at times, “and yet, in spite of the faults, he tries to be more than he has been in the past. He has to overcome himself, the hardest foe to defeat, a task as relentless as Sisyphus’s rock, and he struggles, tries, keeps going forward toward the lofty goal that he knows he can never reach. There is a dearness in his trying, even if he should fail, that no perfection could ever touch.”

“I suppose there is at that, my lady, though I’d never thought of it that way before,” Lizzie said, gazing at her with sympathy.

“And yet…” Guinevere said, then stopped herself.

“And yet perfection is a mighty draw, is it not?” Lizzie said.

“But only a dream, Lizzie,” Guinevere said, looking out at the sunset over Camelot. “When all is said and done, it can only ever be a dream, else the fabric of reality rips to shreds, chaos reigns, and those we most love suffer most.”

“Aye, my lady,” Lizzie said, though she wasn’t sure she saw it all. The only thing she could say for certain was that, even with jewels, power, youth, beauty, and lineage thrown into the balance, she wouldn’t trade places with the queen for anything.


End file.
